Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, MA.
I imagined an enormous rock sticking out of the sand and into the seat, maybe 30 feet high, so that the Pilgrims could step right off their ship onto the rock and then walk onto land, like a natural dock of sorts.
In reality, it’s a large stone in a faux-Greek structure next to the sidewalk. I have bigger rocks lining my driveway.
http://www.collidercove.org/i/2005-July/plymouth_rock-375x500.jpg
Graceland (Elvis Presley’s home) in Memphis, Tenn. I expected to see a monument to garish, tawdry Vegas-style bad taste. But the house is surprisingiy small, and one room - a rec room - has 70s-era shag carpeting and ‘crushed velvet’ walls, but other than that, it was just a house. And a very modest one at that given how much money Presley made.
I saw it shortly after they deemed it unsafe for tourists to enter, and it was covered in support cables. Maybe I’d have been more impressed had I been able to enter it. In pictures, it looks like it’s off by itself (like the Alamo) but in truth it’s surrounded by buildings larger than it, besides all the tourist shops & tents. It just didn’t look like much compared to everything around it.
I liked the Sistine Chapel tour though.
Colonial Williamsburg - lame, lame, lame. I guess I was expecting something a little more…something, but with the exception of the jail tour, it was very boring. But they had fantastic magnolia trees.
Branson, Missouri - unless you are 100 years old, don’t go. I was expecting something more along the lines of Gatlinburg, but it’s just bad shows, dirty “museums” and crappy food. They didn’t even have a decent arcade, or a cool nearby state park of any kind. When the fish hatchery is the most interesting, you’re in trouble.
Although the crowds are crazy (my wife described it as “worse than Vegas”), sometimes there is beauty to be found by looking past the people:
When we lived in San Antonio we would take visitors to the Alamo by parking away from it, walking along the riverwalk and up thru the hotel across the street. At least that way your first view of it wasn’t such a contrast to the surrounding area.
In Pisa I liked that courtyard but that was probably the contrast to the tourist trap booths just outside the walls.
My sons’ biggest disappointment was the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. They were expecting carnival-type funhouse mirrors. They were 12 and 14 at the time.
Martha’s Vineyard
Just one big “um, so?”
You… you didn’t like Colonial Williamsburg? Really?
Professional sports. I’ve been to all of the major American ones (baseball, football, hockey, basketball, and NASCAR) and they are boring as all get out. The game is so chopped up by commercial breaks and timeouts that it doesn’t hold one’s attention in person. At home, you can get a drink, hit the bathroom, or look at something on the internet during commercials. There’s not enough time during a normal break in a game do anything at the stadium except try to ignore whatever stupid thing they are doing to keep the spectators interested.
The warm weather sports can be torturous because of the lack of shade in the stands. For some reason, sitting still in the sun is much more annoying to me than moving around. Cold weather is at least as bad. Indoor sports are spectacularly, relentlessly loud.
Also, most of the time it’s damn hard to see what just happened, because your seats suck, or the action is on the opposite side of the field. So you watch the replay, on a big TV, 5 times, just like home.
Yes - it was just kinda boring. The main street, and the apothecary and the blacksmith shop - all of them were cool. But it was very repetitive, so as we got to the side streets, and the seamstress’ shop and the silversmith, etc., etc, it was nothing new. Plus, the shops seemed to be divided into two kinds - restored shops that were just about empty, and “authentic” shops that were filled with scented candles and horehound candy.
There are just so many rusted handsaws and whalebone stays I can see and still be enthusiastic. I also like architecture a lot, and the very plain building style didn’t excite me (I know, it’s how it was back then).
Those things, topped with the $35 admission fee, which didn’t include the side attractions like the juggler’s show (or whatever), killed it for me. $150+ for my family to walk around in a boring town. Not so much…
Just to defend the Mona Lisa, I have to say that I was struck by it from across the room, and I thought it was beautiful.
So nem! sticks out toungue
I will agree with the pro sporting events.
I love football and I will love it til the day I die, but the amount of time/money that you have to spend in order to go to a live game, probably get seats you cant see anything, with the game that has all of the breaks…it just ain’t worth it.
It’s more fun to go to minor league games and types of games not really shown on tv (Really local sports, high school, etc.)
However I will defend some sporting events/places:
Army/Navy game
ANY Euro soccer (football) game
American football at Lambeu Field (My personal mecca)
Baseball at old Yankee Stadium (this doesn’t apply anymore, but I’ll keep it)
Baseball at Wrigley
Baseball at Fenway
New York City. Its big and crowded and full of flashing lights and horrible musical theatre, that’s about it.
Very similar to the first thing you see when walking through the Brandenburg Gate to the old East German side is a Starbucks on the left. I know Starbucks has a corporate mandate to make as much money as possible… but jeez, how about a little respect for history and trying to be just a little classy.
I came in to say that. I did a complete double take; “what, that’s the Rosetta Stone? THE Rosetta Stone?” Its importance vastly exceeds its visual coolness, and it’s just sitting there like any other exhibit with very little indication of how centrally vital it is to the study of ancient Egypt.
I know it’s sacreligious to say this, but as a baseball fan I was let down by Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park. I expected this sort of uplifting, miraculous feeling of being in a temple of baseball, the way the guys on ESPN say it is, and instead found myself in a couple of old and smelly ballparks. It was cool to be able to say I went, but there wasn’t anything better about seeing a game there than there was anywhere else.
For me, it was the Pyramids at Giza.
The Sphinx moved me greatly, but the Pyramids did not.
Do you people do any sort of historical research before you visit these places? Or do show up expecting naked dancers and Indiana Jones? The colosseum area is just a bunch of broken pieces of marble unless you understand what went on there, for cripes sake.
I haven’t been to Fenway, but I felt the same way about Yankee stadium. It was basically just like how it was going to a game at Tiger stadium before it closed.
I loved Wrigley though, that place is great.
The Alamo (Mission San Antonio de Valero) was actually pretty big, there’s just not much left of it. The Alamo that tourists see today is only a portion of the original structure, just the chapel (the facade of which most people think of as being “the Alamo”) and the Long Barracks. The original structure was a much larger misson, most of which is now occupied by the hotels and office buildings to the west. The north wall where Travis was killed is now the site of the Federal Building a block or two away, across Houston street.
Context, I’d imagine. SF buildings top out at ~800 feet, so the dimensions of Sears or Chrysler sound amazing to me, but they don’t tower above their neighbors in Chi & NYC as much as they are in my head.
Something tells me Burj Dubai is gonna be pretty nifty in person, though.